Since then, if you’ve been lurking on social media much, you’ll have noticed various Christians, Republicans and alt-right sympathizers claiming that this was somehow the fault of “leftists.” At the very least, that it’s equally the fault of leftists. More probably, that leftists and “libtards” have encouraged violence against the right and specifically against white men, and the right was forced to respond in kind. Or, alternately, that leftists dressed up like Nazis and started the whole thing. Antifa, specifically. That Antifa was paid to stir up hatred against white dudes by pretending they were actually racist white dudes.

This is the kind of propaganda and blame-shifting that irks me beyond measure. Really quick: I’ve been invited to Antifa counter-protests of white supremacist functions hundreds of miles from where I live. It was the opposite of an elaborate plot to screw over white supremacists: just being present, if you wanted to be, was the goal. It was not well-publicized; anti-facist protesters are wary of agent provocateurs out to give them a bad rap. There was no offer of payment, no mention of “special busses” that would get me there. If I had gone, I would have driven and lodged myself. And of course, the Antifa counter-protests I was invited to did not make headlines. Nobody was hurt, so nobody cared.

As far as I can figure, it’s kind of a moot point, though. Video and still footage from Charlottesville shows garden-variety nonviolent counter-protestors being attacked unprovoked (unless you consider standing in a street provocation) by white men wearing homemade riot gear: helmets, shields, batons.

The lily-white, lily-livered alt-right believes that affirmative action, for example, which seeks to rectify centuries of policy designed to ensure that whites alone got ahead in life, somehow is “racism” that threatens their very existence. Or at least that’s what they say. It seems difficult to imagine that they’re serious, given that their government is almost entirely white (and male) and white men are still in charge of most big companies in this country. White men have yet to experience anything remotely like what they perpetuated, and continue to perpetuate, on minority populations in this country.

In the name of striking back against leftists and asserting their rights, alt-right individuals have attacked many, in real life, sometimes with lethal consequences. They post memes hoping for a liberal uprising that will allow them to “massacre” the left.

What shocks me most about this is not that it’s happening. This country was founded on the back of violent racism (killing off one people group and using the enslavement of another to build its infrastructure) and it’s never completely stopped. What shocks me is how many evangelicals, wooed by Brietbart and Fox News, parrot white supremacist and alt-right propaganda without even realizing it.

The vilification of the left, of transgender people, of gays, of Black Lives Matter, is shared by many evangelicals who maintain that racism is wrong, but claim that Black Lives Matter are the real racists, so let’s focus on their sins rather than our own.

Although I have seen many Christians protest racism — some were at the counter-protest in Charlottesville — I have yet to see any truly conservative evangelicals call out the American church’s historical ties to white supremacy, and how the alt-right is currently influencing conservative evangelicalism to the detriment of the country. Instead, they focus on bizarre made-up crises, like gay frogs. Or the claim that Christians are “taking fashion tips from sodomites” and that what is required in response is a kind of cultivated inattention to detail, because that’s what masculinity is all about.

Of course, “taking fashion tips from sodomites” isn’t what’s plaguing the church. Being “overly feminized” isn’t what made Mars Hills and nouveau patriarchs popular among American Christians. That’s certainly not what spurred evangelicals to elect Donald Trump, a serial liar, cheater and spurner of everything Jesus stood for, from care of the poor to humility. Evangelicals rallied behind Trump not because they’d grown fond of his meticulous gay-boy good looks; if anything, his shoddy appearance seemed reassuring. His combover is as poorly-coiffed as your Baptist grandfather’s; his self-tanner looks like it was purchased at Walmart.

A majority of evangelicals rallied behind Trump because he promised them their talking points. Abortion should be illegal. Muslims are dangerous. Non-English-speaking immigrants might be rapists. Trans people are losers. If the white patriarchy falls, then the world will be chaos. Trump appealed to a carefully-cultivated set of fears that have nothing to do with Christianity per se, and everything to do with the way American Christianity is leveraged by politicians.

What’s plaguing the modern conservative church, what’s driving it into the arms of those whose words and actions are diametrically opposed to those of Christ, isn’t “taking fashion tips from sodomites.” Aside from those who emulate alt-right bleach freak Milo Yiannopoulos, I can’t say I know any conservative Christians who would be confused with someone participating in a gay pride parade. What’s damning the modern church isn’t “pink hair” and it isn’t “feminization.” It’s the church’s temptation towards a certain reaction to these things; the idea that in the name of resisting the “feminization” of America, it’s now OK to behave like the worst kind of masculine-man there is. A womanizing, lying millionaire who worships the almighty dollar is nothing like Christ, but he is a lot like the pastors of the churches railing against “feminization.” He is a lot like the stereotypical in-charge capitalist man, glaring flaws and all. Arrogant, rapey, rich through allegedly nefarious means, unfaithful, bad at language, self-aggrandizing, in love with golf, fat, old, white.

If you’re convinced that the biggest problem with America is that men are getting too comfortable acting like women, and that whites dudes are in danger of losing their spot at the top of the food chain, then a guy like that might seem like the answer to your problems.

“Uneducated white males.” That’s a phrase I heard from pundits leading up to the election and after it; that’s the base that elected Trump more than any other demographic.

The phrase itself illustrates the main reason Trump won.

It’s true that Trump drew racists and alt-right supporters; that he drew people afraid of what would happen if Hillary became president — including people who believed and re-tweeted the fake stories accusing her and her staff of literal witchcraft. But he also drew a significant segment of the regular-guy population sick of being labeled “uneducated” by politicians; he galvanized the working class by promising to shake up an establishment that treated them with contempt. He promised to bring their jobs back. He promised to resist the tide of globalization sending work overseas. Regardless of the fact that he’d sent his own manufacturing overseas; regardless of rising economics favoring microchips over human workers, they took a chance that he, a big businessman, could help their own bottom line.

This in spite of the fact that worker’s rights have traditionally been championed by the left — the hard-core left and the progressive movement, which plucked turn-of-the-century manufacturing out of the hands of children and instituted the 40-hour workweek, sick leave, child labor laws. The move towards worker’s rights ran contrary to monopolies and top-down capitalism. It was not an easy fight — and in some cases resulted in actual bloodshed.

This in spite of the fact that even in recent years, Republicans have voted against workers’ rights. According to a New York Timesbreakdown on labor policies, “conservative Republicans supported the right of employers to take money [in this case, tips] that workers had earned. This disregard for the earnings of workers is only an extreme manifestation of a more common phenomenon among Republican legislators: their indifference to the problem of wage theft.”

The left lost the votes of the working class when it began patronizing them, becoming, as many working-class people accused them of, “the liberal elite.” The pontificating college professor, the yuppie stay-at-home mom with nothing better to do than manufacture outrage about a “culturally appropriated” textile pattern or two. The left got out of touch with the working class because it saw “uneducated white males” as the problem, the root of racial tensions, sexual “micro-aggressions” and climate change denial. It tried to educate the “uneducated” with graphs and pats on the head — with accusations and not-so-patient sighs. Unsurprisingly, this didn’t work well. And along came a guy who appealed to the visceral rather than the intellectual, along came a guy who spoke in short sentences and said he was on their side. That he would make their country great again. That he’d mop the floor with the people who looked down on them. And they voted for him.

If the left wants the working class back — and they should, for the sake of the working class itself — they’ve got to stop playing it so safe and calculated and intellectual. They’ve got to stop being patronizing. They’ve got to stand for something rather than merely against something.

They’ve got to find their heart and soul again, and they’ve got to be comfortable with callouses on their hands and dirt under their fingernails.

The middle-aged woman, her skin the smooth darkness of equatorial Africa, beckons to the blonde-haired porcelain-tinted child of four. “Can you say ‘je m’appelle Esther’?” I ask the child. She smiles shyly and repeats to the woman: “shmpel Esther.”

The woman laughs and bounces the child onto her lap. “Tu as peur des noirs?” she queries cheerfully. I cannot bring myself to translate this literally, and ask instead: “Esther, have you ever been held by someone from Africa before?”

In this woman’s village, I know, a child of four might, conversely, fear a white person. What a bizarre and ghostly thing pale skin must be for those who have never seen it. The woman’s daughter, only half-white, was shunned (yet revered) by the other village children, she has told me. To compensate, the daughter once ground charcoal and spread it on her body in a thick (though short-lived) paste.

“I don’t think she’s afraid,” says the daughter “In America, there are lots of people with dark skin. She must have seen them before.”

The child is not afraid: she turns and innocently begins talking to the woman, telling her about the backyard swimming pool she likes to swim in when it gets hot outside. The woman understands nothing of the speech: Elle ne comprends pas.

The child is not afraid, but she is not completely at ease either. It is strange to be held by someone like this; someone who talks only incomprehensibly. She smiles but, even at four, she does not look the woman in the eye.

The woman, on the other hand, is unabashedly complementary. She tells the child she is beautiful. She gets the child to repeat it: “shwuibel,” and then, delighted with her propensity for the oddity of French, tells her she is intelligent.

Later, alone with the child, I finally translate the woman’s first question and ask if she was afraid because of the darkness of the woman’s skin.

“No,” she says “but I like light skin better, like me.”

“Oo,” I say (how politically incorrect children are) “that doesn’t mean she’s mean or anything, you know. Didn’t you think she was nice?”

“Yeah,” says the child “but I think light skin is prettier.”

How wicked, exactly, are the honest particular preferences for skin tone, language, nose shape, height-to-weight ratios, curves and muscle tone and teeth and hair and scent? Rarely are such preferences thought bad, unless they injure. Mentioning them, though, seems cruel. Borderline genocidal, even, if it has anything to do with ethnicity; never mind that most people still marry within their particular cultures. So the child must be educated, if not to think that this woman is just as pretty as she is, then at least never to say what is in her mind as she studies the melanin content of her skin.

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About

Katie Botkin is based in the Northern Rockies, where she finds ample opportunity to explore and find quietus. She sees her family often. When she is not otherwise occupied, she blogs.